Fireworks - A Virtual Production Case Study

KFTV

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Short film Fireworks was initially conceived as a stage play by writer Paul Lally, developed as an immersive experience for VR headsets using volumetric capture at the suggestion of producer Annalise Davis then reworked as a virtual production.  

“I was doing a test of another project in the volume at Dimension when I realised that all the ideas we’d explored in VR for Fireworks could be delivered using VP,” says director Paul Franklin. “Once you can find a really compelling creative reason to do it in VP then every aspect of it earns its place.” 

Fireworks is told in real time, in the tense final moments of an MI6 operation to take out a dangerous target who has been tracked down to a Tripoli marketplace.  

Instead of visiting Lebanon, production designer Jamie Lapsley researched the city using Russian language search engines to find “holiday videos” with which to build a version of the city in Unreal Engine. “The project was a chance to design a whole city and to realise that in a way I could never do normally,” says Lapsley. 

Dimension’s Unreal artists discussed lighting, materials and object placement with Franklin’s team before creating realistic props and environments in the software. 

“The goal was to achieve the essence of a real street section,” says Ed Thomas, VP Supervisor. “We built lighting and atmospherics to match what it feels like to be in Tripoli.” 

Franklin navigated the virtual world with VR goggles to plan the shoot. “The time you would normally spend with your production designer, 1stAD and DP to work out how get around the set, you have to devote to the virtual asset because it is going to be baked into principal photography as you shoot it,” he says. 

“I was able to put up a virtual movie camera (an iPad on a shoulder mount) and walk around the space looking into the virtual world and could share that with my cinematographer.” 

Franklin took individual frames from the VR recce to produce storyboards of the entire film.  

“Until you put a headset on and explore it is very difficult to visualise issues you may run into,” says Ollie Downey BSC. “A VR recce means you can get to the bottom of things comprehensively.” 

Dimension’s Unreal lead Craig Stiff not only built the virtual world, he acted as virtual gaffer. “On a normal job you might say to your gaffer ‘I want a SkyPanel here and a backlight there’ and in Unreal Craig can just dial that in,” Downey says. 

Virtual lights combined with practical fixtures were arranged by gaffer Andy Waddington. He says, the physical lighting design has to match the colours and temperatures of the virtual illumination displayed on the LEDs. 

The volume itself consisted of a curved LED screen for the main environment with side panels and a ceiling panel to represent more of the scene wrapping around the characters. 

“We treated it as though we’d built our set actually in this street in Tripoli,” says Downey. “I let the background over expose and treated it as I would a view from a window on a normal set – only one I have more control over.” 

The real and virtual sets were blended. “For example, the texture of the ground has to blend seamlessly into the texture of your digital ground,” Thomas says. “Once you’ve got that it’s very hard to see where reality ends and virtual reality begins.” 

 

 

 

The State of OTT 2022

Streaming Media

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The rapid growth we've seen in OTT over the past decade combined with recent major subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) launches may at last have reached peak acceleration. The market is expected to hold some of its COVID-related progression, but subscriber expansion is slowing—especially in the saturated domestic market.

Research firm J.D Power is among those reporting that the mass lockdown of 2020 acted as an impetus through 2021 for a shift in customer behavior that has permanently altered the way content is consumed. Based on a survey, it says that by June 2021, U.S. viewers increased their streaming subscriptions to an average of 4.5 SVOD providers, up from 3.9 providers in December 2020. A United Talent Agency survey from June 2021 notes that 71% of respondents plan to use more than one SVOD post-pandemic. "Pandemic behavior appeared to mostly stick, while the launch of other streamers like Discovery+, Peacock, and a rebranded Paramount+ helped increase both subscription online video homes and services per home," suggests S&P Global Market Intelligence research director Deana Myers.

According to research company Kantar, the number of American homes signing up for a new subscription was 3.9% between April 2021 and June 2021, down from 12.9% in the same period in 2020. Further evidence of slowing market growth includes Netflix's Q2 2021 gain of 1.5 million, which was down dramatically (85%) from the same period in 2020, when the company reported 10.1 million additions. Disney+'s lowly 2.1 million new subscriptions for its fiscal Q4 2021, which ended Oct. 2, 2021, are down from the 12.6 million added the previous quarter.

Disney has earmarked a whopping $33 billion for new content in 2022—about 39% more than WarnerMedia/Discovery, the industry’s second biggest spender.

Blame is attributed to stay-at-home gains petering out and dog-eat-dog competition, with consumers fatigued by choice while needing to manage their budgets. Still, U.S. homes with streaming subscriptions remained constant at 75%, translating to about 95.8 million households, according to Kantar.

The J.D. Power survey shows that average monthly household spend on all streaming services was $55 in August 2021, up 45% from April 2020. Disney, for example, raised the price of Disney+ in March 2021 to $7.99 per month, or $79.99 per year.

As observed in our article "The State of Video Monetization 2022," judging the success of SVODs on subscriber numbers alone can be misleading, since other factors, such as average revenue per unit (ARPU), are at play (and in the case of Amazon Prime Video, growth in the retailer's overall sales).

Although no new major streaming platform is expected to launch in the U.S. this year, the home market is locked in terms of growth. Streamers will have to adopt a variety of tactics just to stay in the game, let alone recoup multibillion-dollar content spends.

Streamers could pay less for content, but this doesn't seem to be happening. Content spend is rampant, with Disney earmarking $33 billion for 2022, nearly double that of Netflix' $17 billion and considerably larger than the combined WarnerMedia/Discovery war chest of $20 billion. Apple, which generated $365 billion in sales last year, has ample finances to blitz the market.

With churn at all-time highs of between 30% and 40%, content origination is one of the chief weapons in the streamer's arsenal. But to maintain growth, a massive increase in non-U.S. subscribers is essential. Other tactics include offering different service tiers, such as ad-supported options, as outlined in this issue's "The State of Monetization"; growing content libraries through M&A; wooing younger demographics with social engagement; and perhaps a more diverse content portfolio than film and TV shows. I'll explore these next.

Go Global

With Netflix and Amazon Prime Video available in most countries worldwide, competition among major streamers is now international. In 2021, Disney launched Disney+ in Hong Kong and South Korea. Peacock began its European rollout, as did HBO Max, albeit hampered by existing licensing deals—notably with Sky in the U.K., which means the U.K. market is off-limits to HBO Max until 2025.

Emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia tend to generate smaller margins for U.S.-based streamers. The Economist calculates that Disney+ makes less than $1 per month from subscribers in India, while The Hollywood Reporter says that Netflix was forced to slash its Basic plan by 60% in the same country to boost subscription growth and become less of a niche service there.

Even in richer countries, margins are lower than in the U.S. The average U.S. cable bill comes to nearly $100 a month, according to Ampere Analysis. In Britain, it is half that. And whereas Americans are ditching their overpriced cable packages in record numbers, freeing spending power for streaming, Europeans seem to be much more attached to their pay-TV subscriptions.

Increased reliance on international subscribers also means that more content is originating outside of the U.S. This process has been accelerating, with 27% of 2020's most popular titles coming from countries other than the U.S, up from 17% in 2019, Ampere Analysis' Rahul Patel reports in an article on the company's site.

In addition, Patel notes that "from January to October 2021, 37% of the 100 most popular TV shows were produced outside the USA, compared to just 9% of the top 100 movies. Canada, Japan, South Korea, Spain and the UK are emerging as production hubs of globally popular TV shows. The influence of Netflix Originals on this trend is particularly noticeable. Shows like Squid Game, Money Heist and Lupin exemplify the globally popular Netflix [Originals] produced outside the USA. Each became the top title on the platform in over 70 markets (out of the 85 tracked), with Squid Game maintaining the dominant position for at least 14 days in 75 markets."

Shows like Lupin have demonstrated the drawing power of Netflix Originals that were made outside of the U.S.

Patel continues, "This highlights Netflix's ability as a global OTT platform to promote its titles and make them worldwide hits. With more platforms, including HBO Max and Paramount+, expanding internationally, and Disney launching its suite of SVoD products in more markets, we can expect to see an increasing share of the year's most popular content coming from outside the USA."

Go Bigger

Quality, exclusivity, evergreen content, and quantity of content judged against cost are reasons consumers will duck in and out of OTT services—and why streamers are being forced to merge and acquire.

None of the current top five SVODs—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max, as ranked in a survey by Whip Media—should be complacent. "Staying in that group will depend on having an abundance of both compelling original content and evergreen library content to satisfy users when certain originals inevitably decline in popularity," the company reports.

Apple TV+ is in the most precarious position, Whip Media suggests. That backs up a January 2021 MoffettNathanson survey that found that 62% of Apple TV+ subscribers are on a free promotional offer for buyers of Apple's hardware devices and are prone to churn. "Given the importance consumers place on having an adequate library, it's clear Apple's deficiency in this area is limiting its appeal," Whip Media asserts.

Apple has so far eschewed buying content catalogs, but that could change in 2022. Potential deals could be made for film collection Criterion, Lionsgate Entertainment, or AMC Networks, although these could also provide cannon fodder for Netflix. The May 2021 $48 billion merger of AT&T's entertainment unit, WarnerMedia, with Discovery has yet to unwind. Combining HBO Max and Discovery+ "may be awkward and possibly alienate either audience as the two have little overlap in terms of interest," suggests S&P Global Market Intelligence's Myers. However, David Zaslav, the head of WarnerMedia/Discovery who engineered the deal with AT&T CEO John Stankey, is bullish about amassing 200–250 million global subscriptions within 5 years.

"Discovery is to WarnerMedia what Fox was to Disney," comments Sarah Henschel, streaming analyst for Omdia, in a WIRED article. "Aggregation and consolidation are just going to be the fastest ways to be the biggest. I think we'll probably get to a top three to five companies and that's where the economics of these streaming services are going to settle."

The chessboard includes Comcast/NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS/Paramount Pictures, both of which have strong content assets, but not the scale to compete with the top five. The companies are uniting in Europe in 2022 with new streamer SkyShowtime, and a domestic pact is seen as a natural fit.

Going big also means gaining intellectual property with which to retain subscriber loyalty and spin off films, episodic TV, games, and metaverse-related interactions. Disney is the master, with its huge array of Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar titles scheduled over the next few years. There's a land grab for intellectual property in particular that already resonates with the public—hence Amazon's $8.45 billion purchase of MGM, which includes the James Bond franchise and a hint by Amazon that it will create TV shows from the studio's catalog.

Amazon is already doing this with a mega-budget series based on The Lord of the Rings. AppleTV+ has chimed in with an adaptation of the sci-fi classic Foundation; Netflix has hopes for the dramatic series 1899; and HBO Max will launch the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in 2022.

WIRED suggests, "Controlling Hollywood stopped being just about who had the biggest opening weekend at the box office or a massive hit during prime time; a turf war over intellectual property became a land-grab effort to see who could bulk up their streaming service with the best library of content."

Go Interactive

An emerging challenge for video entertainment streamers is a growing competition for consumers' free time—especially younger viewers. Video gaming is a prime target and may be one reason why Netflix is launching a games unit in 2022, with a Stranger Things spinoff as one of its first releases.

"OTT companies are increasingly recognizing games as their new competitor," finds Parks Associates. "Long term, gaming will either prove to be a challenge—or an opportunity—to players in this space."

It's as fundamental a challenge as reinventing the way we consume long-form video as a passive, lean-back experience. Streaming video in its current state doesn't satisfy the desire of consumers to socially interact, which is one reason why Millennials and Gen Z are spending increasingly more time on other types of digital and mobile entertainment.

Certainly, streamers of all stripes are expending huge amounts of effort on highly sophisticated engagement campaigns to reach consumers on social media. Eight streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, and CW Seed—captured more than 227 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube in 2021, according to a Conviva study. Facebook is second to Instagram in overall engagement, with TikTok set to outpace Meta's network in 2022.

"While streaming platforms' pages are the cornerstone of a streaming publisher's social strategy, it's the individual show pages that can truly build the brand affinity craved by publishers," says Keith Zubchevich, Conviva's president and CEO. "Streaming show accounts on social have become intimate forums where fans feel they can truly connect with the show's cast in ways that would normally be reserved for close friends."

Deloitte Insights suggests in its annual Digital Media Trends survey that streamers need to go further to secure their long-term survival. The report says that "younger generations have grown up connecting through digital networks, engaging with digital and interactive entertainment, and relating to the world through a social lens. Gaming is meeting these expectations with unique, immersive experiences that can put players in the starring role. For streaming video providers, understanding social gaming and creating strong relationships with gamers may be critical to future growth."

Streaming video will likely continue to be a dominant force, Deloitte Insights emphasizes. However, any social elements are deferred to the second screen, mobile—which, for many, is really the first screen. "It may or may not make sense for SVOD to offer social and interactivity directly in their services, but they will likely face greater competition in courting younger generations and keeping them as lifelong subscribers if they don't integrate a social element in some way," notes the report.

Bridge the Broadband Divide

It became apparent during the pandemic how reliant we all are on the internet, so it's alarming just how great the digital divide is. This was starkly illustrated in June 2021 when the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released a digital map revealing that in many parts of the country, broadband speeds fell below the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) benchmark of 25Mbps download, 3Mbps upload.

"Given that the FCC's benchmark is pretty low, … this is pretty terrible," comments Matt Wille for Input. "No, that's an understatement—it's a total failure. The many, many red areas on the map just have no access to high-speed internet at all."

For example, in a working-class Latino area in east Oakland, Calif., more than a quarter of people do not have internet access, even though commercial providers exist, NBC News finds. That's compared to a "wealthier and whiter neighborhood" nearby, where only 6% of people lack access to broadband internet.

S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that more than 18 million occupied U.S. households did not subscribe to broadband as of mid-2021. With this in mind, some $20.4 billion of the federal budget is being spent on deploying broadband to close the divide over the next decade. S&P Global Market Intelligence projects $112 billion in U.S. broadband revenues in 2022, up 25.2% over 2019 levels, when the idea of broadband connectivity as an economic lifeline had not yet been put into practice.

[Editor's note: This article first appeared in the 2022 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook.]

 

The Finish Line: Evolving in the Cloud

 copy written for LucidLink

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The company

The Finish Line is a full-service post-production company in the UK. It designs and manages in-house post-production solutions for productions wanting to ensure their budget goes on screen. Providing on-site or remote access editorial, finishing, and mastering services combined with The Finish Line’s talented team always makes sure work is completed to the highest standard regardless of time constraints or location.

Philosophy of change

Since its inception over a decade ago, The Finish Line has been a distributed post-production facility. But throughout that time, its use of technology and the cloud has evolved continually.  

“When I started The Finish Line in 2011, it was just me operating alone, but I wanted to have a distributed workflow from day one,” explains founder and finishing artist Zeb Chadfield. “Partly this was because the industry was emerging from the 2008 recession, and budgets were stripped back. However, it also stemmed from my strong belief that clients care about the quality of high-end picture finishing. By sourcing the best talent from across the globe, we meet and exceed the requirements in delivering exceptional post-production services. 

“I firmly believe that the industry has a duty of care to the people it employs and that actually in doing so everyone is rewarded by achieving the best product on screen.

“Faster systems and better tools were the first places I looked when starting The Finish Line,” but in the end, it’s the people who create the final product. Having the right tools can get them there quicker and make their lives easier along the way.”

In practice, distributed workflows at The Finish Line have meant flexible and remote working, whether the editor is at home or onsite at the production company for the duration of a project. The facility’s only physical hub in London houses a machine room and (pre-pandemic) equipment for QC, mastering, and delivery.

In 2013, the facility moved from LTO tape to AWS Glacier for its archive. This ended up being the first of many steps into the cloud as the facility itself grew to a 20-strong team.

The most recent evolution has been with LucidLink enabling editors to work from their own machines while accessing cloud storage and sharing projects.  

Expansion in a crisis with LucidLink

“LucidLink had been on my radar for a while, and I started testing it during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. I would throw any low-pressure projects at LucidLink to see if there were any particular snags. With any new toolset, you need to safely audit it to see if there’s anything you need to learn because you don’t want to find that out in the middle of an important job. We learned that it was always really stable.”

Chadfield’s damascene conversion occurred when LucidLink came to the rescue in an emergency.

“We had a big documentary feature for a client who had trouble doing their conform internally,” he explains. “We are very regularly up against a fixed transmission date, but this was particularly tight. The program had to be delivered in nine days, and just one act out of ten had been conformed at the client’s side. It was taking them three days to conform to one act. Simple math says there was just not enough time even if we worked round the clock.”

Chadfield took the problem to his team. In the middle of Covid, everyone was working from home. Could this be solved, he wondered, by using LucidLink to connect everyone to shared storage?

The client gave The Finish Line access to all the show’s media at the facility’s HQ. Nine finishing artists were then able to access an act each to conform at home, working from the full resolution media and the same pool of storage via LucidLink.

“They were brilliant and conformed everything over the weekend, so we were ready by Monday to start the final post,” Chadfield says. “We delivered on time, and the client hit transmission. “Had we not had LucidLink, then that job would have been impossible. It was a lifesaver."

The confidence that the success of that project gave Chadfield led him to expand the use of LucidLink across the facility.

 “We started implementing LucidLink workflows for offline editors working on their own system, for offline editors working on our systems, and also for offline editors working across multiple systems in a hybrid arrangement. 

“We have some larger productions with editors working remotely through our virtual systems as well as having a server at their main production office. In addition, some editors will be working remotely from home on local physical systems. LucidLink enables us to share projects wherever the talent is so whatever machine they are on they can access the same account without any complications.”

Using shared physical storage in different locations would be a logistical headache fraught with time-consuming media management. 

“We’d struggle with project replication and bin replication and keeping an up-to-date timeline. With LucidLink, we can forgo all of that. It doesn’t matter where people log in from; they are always able to start work at the right point on their current project.”

Pure redundancy

LucidLink is now being used across every project at The Finish Line – and for project backup too.

“The stability is fantastic. Obviously, we still have backup plans in case of all eventualities, but we’ve been running LucidLink for 18 months now, and we’ve not had to revert to any backup. In fact, LucidLink is now more reliable than other options. It has become our main redundancy option. Even if someone is working from local storage, we are always running a LucidLink storage unit in the background, replicating everything.

He continues, “For example, if we had a major outage in our local storage, we would have the redundancy there to flip over to the LucidLink system and get people up and running. Or, if we were running post-production on a producer’s site and someone gets Covid, and everyone needs to go home, well, it is now very easy for us to flick a switch and carry on because everything is being constantly mirrored in LucidLink storage.”

Timesaving deliverables workflow 

A vital part of the facility’s workflow in final post is the use of cineXtools media-file and deliverables management application. CineXtools from CineDeck avoids teams repeatedly exporting files to accommodate changes to video, audio, or closed captions by streamlining distribution workflow.

“All of our finishing assistants who perform all the QC, mastering, and delivery have a license for cineXtools. We have now integrated cineXtools with LucidLink so that our finishing assistants can create deliverables no matter where they are. If they are using their home systems or working in the office, or shuttling between the two, they’ll use cineX to drop in inserts and updates without having to pull down new files in both directions. 

“They can do full QC on a reference monitor in the office or at home, all via LucidLink, and then if anything changes, they can drop inserts into those files without having to upload a new file. All of the time-consuming back and forth is a thing of the past since they just work from one single pool of LucidLink storage.”

Leading by example

In film, TV, and postproduction in particular, long work hours are treated as normal. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

“Early in my career, I worked at post facilities where we were squeezing two to three-day jobs into a single day,” says Chadfield. “Working long hours is a management and planning problem, not a badge of honor. When I decided to set up my own company, I made it a personal goal to ensure that nobody who works for me ever has to go through what I did. 

“Ensuring you’re working with the best tools can save time and headaches but, make no mistake if this is a means to an end, that end is less time working, not more time to cram work in.”

“My focus, therefore, is on the best talent and best kit to work with; ultimately, those things work the best. Our only goal at The Finish Line is to deliver incredible-looking pictures. To do this, we fill our company with the best talent in the business and do everything we can to look after and support them.”

Work-life balance prioritised by post

 IBC

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A new focus on flexible working arrangements post-pandemic should see productivity gains all round.

Earlier this month, the UK Screen Alliance, in consultation with its members, withdrew the specific Covid restrictions on film and TV post production.

While various Covid guidance developed by the British Film Commission, broadcasters and Pact remain in place (it is still mandatory to consider Covid-19 within a company’s risk assessment) in practice these are falling away just as they are in other industries and society.

This presents the post-production sector with a dilemma for its employees, though not nearly as fraught a one as having to co-ordinate working from home in Spring 2020.

The issue is how to reset the working and home life balance of the post operation. The pandemic has, after all, put a firebreak under work conditions and a chance to cement a more flexible set of office to home office working arrangements, arguably more conducent to productivity and wellbeing.

“We’re a progressive thinking company, so if this ‘reset’ is an opportunity to create a better work-life balance, then we should embrace it,” says Vittorio Giannini, MD/EP, Freefolk. “We believe a hybrid working model is the way forward, with a strong sense of being together, teaching and learning from each other and creating the right culture which at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean being in the office Monday to Friday 9-til-6.”

Chance to press reset

Anecdotally, few editors want to go back to the way things were. Many already moved outside London pre-pandemic and many more did so during the past couple years.

Nor do they need to be in a city centre suite, often with no-one else in attendance, perhaps until performing the final client review (which can also be achieved with live streaming tools).

“Flexibility is the key and letting each head of department decide, with their teams, the working week according to the needs of the project,” says Giannini. “We’re all able to have a say, to some extent, in how we want to structure our work time and we will try and accommodate it, without compromising the projects that we’re working on.

“Some of our staff are fully remote, purely because of geography and others want to come into the studio two or three days a week. Our technical set up means that there’s total flexibility and we work with our staff to ensure that they are able to work both remotely and in the studio.”

Adopting flexible work arrangements is arguably long overdue in a sector renowned for surviving on tight on budgets with staff squeezed on time.

An important creative wing of a project it may be but post production was also seen as the fixing area for when things don’t go as well as planned on set or in the edit. Any last-minute changes required by clients fell on the facility to accommodate.

“Many well laid plans are compressed into the existing post schedule with additional work,” Giannini says. “This has very rarely been reflected in either budgets or understanding of the post company’s work life balance. The knock-on effect for all employees is then burn out. Without additional budget the existing team has to complete the work.”

Prioritising mental health

Zeb Chadfield, Founder, The Finish Line, has been more vocal than most about the detrimental impact of working conditions in the industry. He says prioritising a duty of care to staff and producing great work are far from mutually exclusive.

One of the biggest problems in the industry, he believes, is long working hours and just how normalised those hours have become. That problem is compounded by things like widespread ‘imposter syndrome’, making artists feel they should simply be lucky to have a job.

“Our lives get written off in our love for the work and everyone takes advantage of that,” he says. “Working long hours should be seen as a management and planning problem, not a badge of honour.”

Chadfield has been working with The Film and TV Charity which reported that almost 90% of off-screen film and TV professionals in the UK have experienced mental health issues on the job (significantly worse than the general population figure, which stands at 65%).

“We need guidelines which advise clients to talk to post in advance of scheduling a project to make sure that, even with a tight budget, the project is created based on realistic expectations that don’t require artists to forgo their personal lives because the budgets are wrong,” he says.

When Chadfield started The Finish Line a decade ago he did so with a distributed post production model and an attitude that prioritised his employee’s mental health.

“We’ve proved that not only can a post-production facility like mine survive, but it can thrive,” he says.

The Finish Line structures projects around shorter days and longer timelines to keep workloads manageable. When overtime is needed, it comes with recovery time, as well as food and travel budgets.

“Now I’ve shown it works, I want these standards to become the industry norm. After the pandemic, I hope we’ll all have learned to see things with a new perspective, and reconsider what it means to care about your team,” he adds.

Low budgets will always be a factor and have often been the start of many a great creative’s career or working relationship with an artist or post team. No-one is saying these should be culled.

“More flexibility for our staff allows more space to do these projects in their own time without the added pressure of being in the studio during the weekend or late at night,” says Giannini. “Our creatives are always keen to take on interesting projects that don’t necessarily have the budget to support them but if they can be done in and around their own schedule it takes the stress out of the equation.”

Flexible work arrangements

To be clear, trusting staff to structure their work hours to fit in with their lives does not automatically mean everyone wants to work from home. On the contrary, the enforcement of that during 2020-21 has opened people’s eyes to the vital importance of colleague and client connection for health and for creativity.

“At the beginning of Covid, when we all had to work from home, it would hardly fit the idyllic image of what most people had in mind if this were suggested pre-Covid,” remarks Natascha Cadle, Creative Director and Co-Founder, Envy. “Not only did you have to work but you also had to school your children, self-motivate and hope that your internet connection kept working.

“I feel that we are experiencing almost an even more ‘pressured’ working environment now, supposedly post-Covid. Although hybrid working can be achieved for certain roles in the creative industries, which does help with the work-life balance, a lot of people are not able to do so.

“A lot of employees at Envy have requested to keep coming into work so that they can separate their home and work life more efficiently. It’s an individual choice. Not everyone has the luxury of space in their home and able to create a work environment.”

Cadle also reasons that working from home won’t necessarily benefit the next generation of talent. “You just don’t learn as efficiently from colleagues over Zoom,” she says. “We all thrive on social interaction which is essential to every aspect of our emotional and physical health. Our industry is a very social and collaborative and that is not always easily achieved when you work remotely.”

The UK is enjoying an unprecedented film and TV production boom which should be fantastic for the whole industry but it is suffering acute skills shortages. From VFX artists and set designers to production managers into post, the issue is causing delays to some shooting schedules and is also fuelling wage inflation leaving a lot of producers struggling to cope.

“Post has always had to deal with the same issues and of course it varies enormously from project to project,” says Cadle. “All we can do is show how much value we provide as a service industry and underselling ourselves is a disservice for the whole industry.”

NFTs Come To Connected TV

Streaming Media

You know you've reached peak NFT when you don't have to explain what the letters mean and when there's an entire TV channel devoted to the things.

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Launching on Roku, StreamNFT is the first connected TV app devoted to NFT art. For that tiny fraction of the population who own NFT art, StreamNFT presents a software-based solution for getting your NFTs on a TV.

By installing StreamNFT from the Roku Channel Store and then logging in with their Ethereum-based wallet, a customer's NFTs are automatically downloaded from the blockchain, and optimized to display on all Roku-enabled streaming devices and Roku-platform televisions (about 60 million in the market, according to estimates).

"I think what we're doing bridges a few worlds that are very exciting: Connected TVs, NFTs, and Web3," explains Kevin McCarthy, founder of NFT Lab, which is behind StreamNFT. "At a high level, StreamNFT for Roku offers utility for NFT aficionados, and discovery and exploration for everyone."

He continues, "When many people think of NFTs, they think of collections (someone makes 10,000 of something, with different attributes for each NFT). That's not really what we're about."

NFT Lab launched in 2021 with a search engine for NFTs that aims to connect interested buyers with the marketplaces like Foundation, SuperRare, Nifty Gateway, and Rarible.

"We think we're a cross between a product comparison engine and a search engine," McCarthy blogged at the time. "Much of the information we're aggregating and displaying for you here is not available, to our knowledge, anywhere else on the Internet. What we've created isn't TikTok or YouTube, it's something different, but I think equally engaging. It's straight art."

It has since indexed and curated about 560,000 pieces of unique 1:1 digital art growing at a rate of 1000+ daily.

The bulk are still images but the total also includes over 50,000 videos that meet its algorithmic criteria for displaying on a TV, another 50K videos that don't meet that threshold, and about 20,000 NFTs that have file formats that currently aren't able to display on the Roku device – (GIF files can display but not animate, 3D files cannot display at all, and a few more obscure still image file formats).

"One more interesting feature here that's totally behind the scenes is we're customizing our streams that you see to the device you're visiting the StreamNFT Channel with. So 720p, 1080p, and 2160p (4K) users will have slightly different experiences, tailored and maximized to what they can support. I'm sure that's old news for CTV pros, but for NFTs, which live on the blockchain, it's pretty cool."

The average length of video is 30-45 seconds. There are also 2-second videos (many of these are designed to display on an endless loop, and there's a feature in the channel called "pin this NFT to my TV" to support this).

There's also longer-form content up to around 10 minutes. "Since no one has ever put NFTs on a TV, we're kind of finding the road as we drive it. We have the ability for registered users to "Like" and "Dislike" content, so hopefully they'll continue to help us light the path."

McCarthy certainly has a point that millions of NFTs have been created, but the vast majority have never had an audience of more than a few dozen people.

"The reason that much of this art is forlorn to obscurity is not because it's terrible—quite the contrary! It's because no one has ever attempted to organize, sort, and rank these NFTs, and present only the best content on a CTV.

StreamNFT is also presenting information, such as title, description, created date, marketplace of origin, and last sale price in the StreamNFT channel. 

At CES this year Samsung announced an "NFT aggregation platform" integrated into its smart TVs. The idea, according to a press release, is that users "can preview an NFT before purchasing it and even learn about its history — from who created it, to what comprises its blockchain metadata."

Whether this is done with remarkable foresight or is simply the biggest waste of space in a TV ever is hard to tell but the firm was not alone in talking about non-fungible tokens.

LG are moving into this space too but McCarthy says any planned features require the purchase of the latest hardware from those companies. StreamNFT on the other hand "has a simple and fast integration with your existing hardware and CTV setup".

NFT Lab's primary goal is discovery and entertainment and that a natural extension from that is commerce. It currently shows the last sale price (converted to $USD, at the time of the sale – some of the marketplaces transact in Ethereum, some in USD) and will be adding a 'For Sale Price' shortly.

Currently, when you press up or down on the remote, while watching a Stream, you get presented this NFT Info Menu. This allows you to scan the QR code that appears on your TV screen, and be taken directly to the marketplaces where this NFT currently trades, and make an offer or buy it outright.

McCarthy believes bringing Web3 media to a Web2 (or is it Web1?) device like a Connected TV will open the NFT market beyond its current niche.

"Most of the NFT websites/marketplaces are pretty technical, and the trend at this moment in NFTs is to focus on 'collections' (like Bored Apes or Crypto Punks)," he says. "This wasn't how NFTs burst back into pop culture in late 2020, early 2021 though. It was "1 of 1" unique digital art that thrust NFTs in the mainstream, and we think this trend may swing back to more unique digital creations in the future."

Could the channel be a platform for content creators to use tokens to fund and market new shows?

"I'd love to explore with content creators what their goals and challenges are," he says. "We are definitely are on the bleeding edge of what's possible, so it would be an interesting discussion, for both of us, if nothing else. We're currently a completely free channel with no advertising to maximize growth."

It's possible that the people buying NFTs will one day find their investments as valuable as original Picassos and Monets. But the NFT market appears to be cooling off. Even NFT mogul Gary Vaynerchuk recently predicted  98 percent of NFTs would lose money.

In response there's now an increasing focus on "utility"—basically, bundling other things with an NFT purchase (like concert tickets, signed memorabilia or early access to future releases) to ensure there's something of value included, even if the value of the NFT itself goes to zero.

"NFTs are personal property, in a way most other digital goods aren't," says Kevin Roose in The New York Times.  "When you upload a video to YouTube, YouTube hosts that video on its servers and effectively makes all of the decisions related to that video — whether it violates community guidelines, whether it's eligible to run ads, whether it gets recommended by the algorithm, and so on."

But NFTs live in their owners' crypto wallets, which aren't chained to any particular platform, and they can use them any way they choose.

There's also the idea that NFTs can be interoperable — that is, unlike buying a ‘skin' in Fortnite that can only be used inside Fortnite, you can theoretically take NFTs with you from one virtual environment to another.

"Or if you get mad at OpenSea, you can easily take your NFTs (which live in your crypto wallet, not on OpenSea's servers) and trade them on a different platform," says Roose. "That kind of thing doesn't happen in social media. If you have a YouTube channel, you can't simply port your subscribers over to TikTok when you feel like it."

NFT Marketplaces Evolve

"Most NFT transactions come from a small handful of traders that are chasing the next flip [quick trade]," points out Peter Yang, product lead at Reddit in this blog. "But marketplaces should focus on the next 1 billion people who can buy NFTs but don't."

Specifically, Yang thinks marketplaces should make it easy for people to buy NFTs directly with credit cards (the biggest, OpenSea, already supports this).

Yet OpenSea's collector profiles are missing basic social features such as a follow button and the ability for collectors to customize their profile.

"Making people care about their profile and social graph will help marketplaces build stickiness," Yang says.

He also thinks NFT marketplaces need to evolve discovery from focusing on top trending projects to personalized recommendations and search based on each user's on-chain activity and preferences.

"To put it simply, NFT marketplaces should be the web3 Google or Amazon."

Twitter, for example, has shipped basic features like setting your profile pic to be an NFT. "It's already the go-to platform for web3 people to connect with each other and discover cool projects. Why not let people add a wallet and track on-chain activity as well?"

 

Wait, Is Web3 Actually a Capitalism Long Con?

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Web3 boosters say they’re building the digital utopia we’ve long been promised — but looking past the rhetoric makes that impossible to believe.

article here

For Business Insider, tech writer Paris Marx argues that Web3 is a plan to further commercialize the internet and build a new set of monopolies.

While the price of bitcoin soared to its peak of nearly $70,000 in November 2021, it subsequently fell more than $67,000 a coin to just over $35,000 on January 22, prompting critics to become even more outspoken about their concerns with NFTs, DAOs, and the Web3 space as a whole.

One of the most trenchant is Marx (Paris, not Karl, though there are similarities in attacking Big Capital), who aims to prick the bubble.

“Crypto evangelists promise this new internet will be more democratic and free of corporate control, where every user will have unprecedented opportunity to make a living online and own their virtual goods,” he writes.

Instead Web3 is just another incarnation of control, monopolies, greed and another revolutionary technological advancement that failed to live up to its promise.

Web3, its backers argue, will finally fulfill the cyberlibertarian promises of earlier iterations of the internet. That is, you’ll get all the benefits of big platforms — ease of use, access to community, and creative potential — and none of the drawbacks: no one selling your personal data, no big companies taking high fees for themselves or government regulations stifling what you do.

The intent is that we can all own pieces of internet services through ownership of tokens (NFTs), and that those tokens give users property rights. Instead of users owning nothing, Web3 is supposed to allow us to buy and sell every little part of the internet.

But as Marx points out, commercial pressures have a habit of getting in the way of emancipatory claims.

He deconstructs the Web3 model. Take mining transactions on the blockchain, for example:

This process is highly concentrated. In order to complete a transaction, or add a new block to the chain, a computer must solve complex math problems. In the case of bitcoin, only about 50 miners (0.1% of the total number) control half of the mining capacity, according to a 2021 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. For Ethereum, just two mining pools controlled more than half the computational power as recently as 2020, according to a report that year.

That’s important, Marx contends, because once a coordinated group of miners controls more than 50% of the power, they can interfere with the process of adding new blocks, stop other miners from completing them, and effectively do whatever they want with transactions on that chain.

On top of that the space is quickly consolidating around dominant companies in various niches, such as the crypto exchange Binance, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, or services like Infura or Alchemy — in the same way that e-commerce, social media, and content platforms also consolidated into a few major players as their sectors matured.

“There’s good reason to believe that consolidation will continue,” he argues. “Since most people won’t be able to (or don’t want to) figure out the technical details of a system, there is an incentive for companies to offer new users simpler access to the same tools in exchange for doing it on their service — which is exactly the goal of the venture capitalists getting involved in the space.”

The mounting incentives for centralization mean that Web3 will likely end up looking much like our current internet, just with a different set of corporate megaplayers.

That brings Marx to one of the biggest problems with the Web3 ecosystem: It’s deeply reliant on cryptocurrencies, which are less currencies and more speculative financial assets.

Other critics have observed that the crypto house of cards resembles Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

“The entire space is plagued with practices like wash trading to artificially boost the values of NFTs and pump-and-dump schemes that inflate coin or NFT values before the creator cashes out with everyone else’s money.”

As Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates observed, crypto does not produce value; it just redistributes the money that enters into the system like a casino.

“In that way, it’s a negative-sum investment,” Marx says. “There are a bunch of players, like the exchanges, front-running customers’ trades and taking cuts for themselves along the way. So unless you buy early or have a lot of money to begin with, you will lose every time.”

Here’s the crunch: “Web3 advocates want the rest of us to believe that this is the real emancipatory version of the internet. But it can’t be because there’s a fundamental conflict between the lofty goals of freedom and decentralization, and the interests of venture capitalists swarming to Web3 to build companies that can monopolize their segment of the industry.”

Marx, not alone in calling out these trends, wants anyone thinking of jumping into crypto to look critically at what is being built — from the “rampant financialization” and the “creation of artificial scarcity” by extending property rights, to digital goods and the “enormous energy requirements causing blackouts in many countries” — and ask whether the future Web3 companies are building really aligns with their rhetoric. And when we see that it doesn’t, we can start imagining what should be built instead.

 

Turns Out There’s a Streaming Model for Everyone

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There’s a lazy line of argument that says legacy media and big tech players in the streaming wars are all wannabe Netflixes. The thinking goes that whether you’re Disney, Paramount or Apple, Netflix is the target, and becoming more like Netflix is the best strategy to outstrip Netflix.

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David Poland, a media analyst writing in The Hot Button newsletter on Substack, says this ain’t so.

“It’s almost funny to watch these power players aspire to something they cannot become. And it’s not, as some assert, that Netflix is the leader in streaming and can never be caught. That is just silly. How the others get to similar numbers — and I believe they absolutely can — will be through different strategies than Netflix used.”

Every other major streaming company has been built out of an existing business. And that includes Netflix’s origins in the DVD rental and postal business.

“This difference has been pointed at, almost universally, as a severe handicap to every other streamer,” Poland notes, when in fact Netflix is carrying a millstone around its neck, too, a “different millstone than anyone else’s.”

He elaborates: “What Netflix created, as it turned out, made more sense for legacy media than it actually did for Netflix. If a significant part of the on-demand world is and will always be library content, who is best suited to success in that model? The legacy media companies.”

After a few years of licensing movies for almost nothing, Netflix first raised the price point for content in year-long and multi-year deals with companies like The Weinstein Co. and Relativity Media. Then, as those deals led to bigger suppliers wanting even more money, Netflix decided to build its own library and has spent around $100 billion on content in less than a decade to get there.

But legacy media don’t have to spend to build an archive. What’s more, there are other reasons they need not follow Netflix’s subscription-based and increasingly internationalized approach to market share.

Poland points out that AVOD (ad-driven on-demand) demonstrates to streamers that they can build an “unexpectedly robust audience.” Second, he says, it has turned out that internationalizing television is a lot more complicated than it first seemed — for everyone. Meanwhile, linear media is dying a lot slower than expected, prolonging the TV business.

All the major players — Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, Apple, Paramount and Comcast — are considering multiple strategies. Amazon, for instance, is buying live sports rights and Apple has just joined them, teaming with MLB for Friday night games.

He thinks Disney “just need to up their game and present a united front” when it comes to Disney+ and Hulu. “Disney needs the combination, whether it’s called a bundle or not, to make enough month revenue per sub to make this work for them, especially as cannibalization of their linear business speeds up. Hulu is a lot more like Netflix, conceptually than Disney+ is.”

AT&T, he says, is betting big on David Zaslav being prepared to succeed in the biggest job of his strong career, as he steers the new Warner Bros. Discovery brand.

“Paramount is a bit of a blur, feels like it’s getting better, but most of the media feeling about it driven by the mistakes around distributing Yellowstone and spin-offs… Comcast has not much sexy happening. Universal is the most strategically consistent full-service studio. NBC seems to be turning into CBS of a decade ago, with no strong voice under 60. Peacock is still unable to launch a hit. And Wall St. media is still obsessed with them buying Paramount or some other studio to no clear end.”

The point is all these companies come to the streaming evolution with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

“The worst thing for any of them is to chase anyone else’s success. We are too early in this cycle — except for Netflix — to be playing the game that way and winning.”

 

Our Collective (and Codependent) Relationship with Data

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That message from Microsoft or Google telling you that you’ve exceeded the limit of your email storage. You know the one. An increasing number of people are getting it and are consequently involved in a mad scramble to delete as much of the account as they can in order to receive and send more and more emails or photos.

article here 

You delete entire years’ worth of “sent” items; repeatedly empty the wastebin. Eventually it makes a bit of a dent in the GBs of data you’ve stored without thinking twice.

And, of course, Google and Microsoft will then invite you to ease your worries by buying into their upgraded cloud bucket.

Drew Austin has experienced this too, and uses it as a jumping off point in an article in Wired that discusses the way our personal information and collective archive has been dismembered and devalued by the internet.

“By fostering the sense that our wells of personal information were bottomless, Google turned us all into information hoarders.”

As it turns out, the cloud is not an infinite resource.

Google has gradually upped the free storage space on Gmail since its launch in 2004 from a gigabyte to 10 gigs in 2012, and 15 gigs a year later. Then, in 2020, it introduced fees. Not a lot — I pay $1.99 a month, but, says Austin, “If Google eventually charges more for storage, we will almost certainly keep paying without thinking twice. Most likely, we won’t have much of a choice.”

Chucking up photos and video and email and documents into the cloud is not mere habit. For Austin, they are fundamental expressions of our evolving relationship with information.

“Google’s first and most revolutionary product, search, enables us to be casual, even messy, with our data. We are only able to thoughtlessly accumulate such massive volumes of information in our personal accounts because we have search capabilities powerful enough to help us navigate that data, the same way we navigate the public internet.”

Largely because of Google, searching has replaced sorting in personal information management; instead of organizing our data using a legible system or knowing where things are, it can all go into one seemingly jumbled pile.

“It is not surprising, then, that to a younger generation raised on search, the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish.”

Despite Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” the company has also contributed to the internet’s privatization.

One example: The rise of email newsletters on platforms like Substack has moved blogging to private inboxes, meaning that thousands of individuals frequently store their own duplicative copy of a post that would have previously been hosted on a just single server. Meanwhile, many blogs that were active 10 years ago are no longer available on the internet at all.

Some sort of spring clean is needed at an individual level. Austin urges us to develop better systems for organizing, prioritizing, and even discarding the information that we accumulate — not because we’re concerned about running out of space, but because our hoarding behavior diminishes the utility of the information that is truly valuable.

He claims such efforts are needed to combat the deterioration of the infrastructure for publicly available knowledge. As with any public good, the solution to this problem should not be a multitude of private data silos, only searchable by their individual owners, but an archive that is organized coherently so that anyone can reliably find what they need.

That used to be called a library. But it’s going to be almost impossible outside of a Quantum computer-powered AI to preserve all of our information in searchable form.

On the plus side, we may not actually run out of digital storage capacity. Despite the world’s rapidly growing production of data advances in storage efficiency are thought likely to keep pace.

There are innovations aimed at saving our collective online consciousness. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (which describes itself as a digital library) scrapes the web continuously, saving as much of it as possible as frequently as possible.

Perma, which is  owned by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, minimizes what Austin calls “link rot” by converting hyperlinks in scholarly documents into “reliable, unbreakable link(s) to an unalterable record of any page you’ve cited.”

“Tools like Perma,” he says, “enable libraries to fulfil their potential as archives of digital information and organizing systems for knowledge, by reducing the ephemerality of material that is worth preserving.”

The most ambitious and holistic efforts to make digital information more durable and publicly accessible, arguably, are Web3 and the blockchain technology that underpins it.

Blockchains are inherently immutable and distributed publicly among peer-to-peer networks, seeming to directly address the shortcomings of the privatized, individualized internet.

“Regardless of information’s ability to keep growing, it will be necessary to restore collective approaches to organizing that information and to continue rebuilding the infrastructure for public knowledge that has atrophied alongside the rise of private archiving,” Austin contends.

Instead of personally owning most of the information we need — on our own devices and in the cloud — we can inhabit a world where more of that information exists in the public sphere and we simply know where to find it.